Every one of my friends had a bad day somewhere in her history she wished she could forget but couldn't. A very bad mother day cha...nges you forever. Those were the hardest stories to tell. . . . "I could still see the red imprint of his little bum when I changed his diaper that night. I stared at my hand, as if they were alien parts of myself . . . as if they had betrayed me. From that day on, I never hit him again."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Then felt I like some watcher of the skiesWhen a new planet swims into his ken;...Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyesHe stared at the Pacific--and all his menLooked at each other with a wild surmise--Silent, upon a peak in Darien.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

When we affect to condemn savages, we should remember that by doing so we asperse our own progenitors; for they were savages also.... Who can swear that among the naked British barbarians sent to Rome to be stared at more than 1500 years ago, the ancestor of Bacon might not have been found?--Why, among the very Thugs of India, or the bloody Dyaks of Borneo, exists the germ of all that is intellectually elevated and grand. We are all of us--Anglo-Saxons, Dyaks and Indians--sprung from one head and made in one image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I tell parents ... when they are the recipients of public humiliation inflicted by their irrational toddlers or preschoolers, and ...they are being stared at by clucking strangers, to repeat this mantra: "I do not know these people. They are not my friends. I will never see them again."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

--First a shiver, and then a thrill,Then something decidedly like a spill,--...And the parson was sitting up on a rock,At half-past nine by the meet'n'-house clock,--Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!MWhat do you think the parson found,When he got up and stared around?The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,As if it had been to the mill and ground!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There are some things, my dear Fisher, which do not bear much looking into. You undoubtedly have heard of the Siberian goat herder... who tried to discover the true nature of the sun. He stared up at the heavenly body until it made him blind. There are many things of this sort, including love and death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »